Mental practice (or motor imagery) involves visualizing actions, to improve your ability to perform them. For example, to learn how to perform moves in your favorite sport, you can rehearse these moves by visualizing yourself performing them. Mental practice can be a beneficial technique to use in various domains, so it’s worthwhile to learn …
A garden path sentence is a sentence with an ambiguous part, that leads the reader to initially assume a certain interpretation for the sentence, until they reach a point where the ambiguity is resolved and this initial interpretation is shown to be wrong. Essentially, when you read a garden path sentence, you encounter an ambiguous …
Marcus Aurelius was an eminent Roman emperor and one of the most influential writers on the topic of Stoicism, which is a philosophy that revolves around seeking virtue in life, without letting yourself be ruled by negative emotions. Aurelius’ writing on Stoicism is best represented in Meditations, a book which is frequently mentioned as one …
Solving technical issues is generally simpler than most people think. In fact, by following the steps outlined in the upcoming flowchart, you will be able to solve nearly all of the issues that you encounter, whether they’re in your computer, in your phone, or in any of your other devices. If you have a friend …
You’ve probably been in the following situation: you’re talking to someone whom you don’t know very well, and in an effort to get to know you better, they ask something along the lines of “what’s your favorite movie?” or “what’s your favorite book?”. Odds are that you now have to start racking your brain …
A phonetic alphabet is an alphabet in which each letter is represented by a codeword that starts with that letter. For example, in a phonetic alphabet, the letter ‘B’ could be represented by the word ‘Bravo’, while the letter ‘P’ could be represented by the word ‘Papa’. The NATO phonetic alphabet, which uses a standardized set …
A common piece of conventional wisdom is that you should never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. Intuitively, this makes sense: if you’re already full when you go to buy food, you’ll be less tempted to buy extra food items. However, studies on the topic show that this is not always the case. Rather, …
Did you ever spend hours going over the same document again and again, and found yourself automatically skipping over whole words and sentences, because you already read this text so many times that your brain just goes on autopilot? Proofreading is an important but tedious part of writing. The problem is that since your brain …
The spotlight effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate the degree to which they are observed and noticed by others, as well as the degree to which others care about the things that they notice about them. For example, the spotlight effect could cause someone to think that everyone is going …
In game theory, a smart player accounts for the fact that the choices that other players make reveal a lot about their position. This article will show you how this concept works and how you can take advantage of it, by looking at the example of the Money Envelope game. The setting Richard and …